I was ten when it all began.
Well, to be honest, I can’t be sure. For all I know the events of this story
could have been set in motion the day I was born. To be honest it would explain
a lot, but at the moment I cannot focus on such things.
I grew up
in a normal family in a small town in New Jersey. For sake of keeping the thrill
seekers and paranormal investigators from suffering my fate, I’ll call it Basking
Hill. Growing up in Basking Hill was normal, painfully normal. We had a school,
a couple of Mom-and-Pop stores, and a small medical clinic; you know, the kind
of town where you didn't have to travel too far to get what you needed, but where
you always felt like you were trapped in a bubble.
No one ever really left Basking
Hill for too long, and outside of the occasional sidetracked traveler, no one
ever really came. With a community like this, it really didn't take long to
know everyone. Everything that happened in this town, no matter how small an
incident, would be public knowledge by the end of the week, so people made a
point in keeping a proper, clean image. And that’s where my normal life came to
an abrupt halt.
You see, my sister, Sarah, was born
three years before me, and even as an infant my parents knew she was…different.
As a baby she would never cry; even when she was born. She was silent, never
making a sound other than the occasional whimper. The doctors thought she might
have been mute until one day, shortly after I was born, she said her first
word, “Rake.” Apparently my mother was so surprised by my sister’s first word
that she nearly dropped me right then and there. She laid me down in my crib
and called my father, who left work early in the hopes of hearing his daughter
speak for the first time, “rake,” she said, and my father was filled with
happiness.
And for the next decade our lives
were normal. Sarah and I both went to the same school. We teased each other, we
picked on each other, but we loved each other. She would help me with my
homework when I was having trouble, I would sit there, pretending to understand
what she was talking about when she had a crush on some boy at school. We were
inseparable, and we never let anything come between us. But then, when Sarah
turned thirteen, that’s when everything changed.
You see, our school has a tradition
that when you turn thirteen you write a paper about the first twelve years of
your life. It’s supposed to be a reflection on your past as you take another
leap in life. Most of us bullshitted our way through the paper. But not my
sister. No, she, being the overachiever that she was, felt obligated to put her
best effort into that paper. She decided to write about firsts: first day at
school, first award in a competition, first kiss, you get the picture. But,
feeling the paper was missing something, she wanted to add a little insight
from our parents, so she asked our mother, “What was my first word?”
My mother’s mouth turned into that
nostalgic smile that you see the elderly give when their grandchildren are in
their care, and she said, “Rake.” My sister wrote it down, and set out to
finish her paper. I remember this moment, I remember it very well, because of
all the memories I have of the time before our lives were turned on their heads,
this one memory is the clearest of them all.
When she got her paper back about a
week later she was overjoyed. The paper never receives a grade, but our
principal commended her for her fabulous work. My mom, I guess in the hopes of
setting a good example for writing, made me read that paper. So I, being the
nice, well-mannered son of a loving mom and dad, pretended to read her flawless
paper, devoid of the markings of the red pen of death so common on everything I
had ever turned in. That is, until I read the one comment on the entire paper,
written in neat little cursive on the last page, “Rake,” it said, “that’s an
odd first word.”
I was confused. What about that was
so strange? It’s not like she was spewing pagan chants or speaking in tongues
or anything. So that night, when we all sat down for dinner, I asked my sister,
“Why does Principal Warren think that ‘rake’ is a weird first word?”
My mother swallowed a bite of food
and said, “It’s just not something you would expect,” She swallowed another
bite of food and continued, “After all, how often does someone say the word
“rake” in front of a baby?” She chuckled, “We never were sure which one of us
it was either.”
My father nodded as he cleared his
plate, and I was ready to accept my mother’s explanation. But then I turned to
my sister, who stared silently at a fork full of food, lost in thought until my
mom asked if she was finished.
I don't know if I was concerned or
curious, a distinction I’ve had a lot of trouble making over the course of my
life, but for whatever reason, that night I snuck out of bed and quietly made
my way into my sister’s room. “Devin,” she said in an exhausted voice, almost
as if she had been crying, “is that you?”
I didn't know if I had woken her
up, or if she had already been sitting in the dark, wide awake before I came
in, but I closed the door and turned on the light. I noticed a photo album on
the bedside table labeled “Sarah: 1989-1994”--The first five years of her life.
Ignoring it, I walked over and sat at the foot of her bed. Noticing her puffy
eyes I asked her, “What’s wrong?”
She sniffed and rubbed her nose,
“Devin, have you ever noticed anything strange. Like, something that, for no
reason, made you scared?” I shook my head, “I’ve been having bad dreams,” she
hugged her knees to her chest, “In them I see something… shadows. And they
chase me. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t run…I can never get away.” With
a trembling hand she picked up the photo album and opened it on her lap, “And
in these photos of me, I can see shadows, look.”
She pointed to a spot on one of the
photos, but I saw nothing. But, not wanting to make her feel any worse, I lied,
and told her that I thought I saw something. She wiped her eyes and smiled
before pulling me in and hugging me. “Thank you,” she said, “I love you.” She
let go of me and lied down in her bed. I turned off her light and quietly left
to go back to bed.
I couldn't have been asleep for
more than a few minutes when a bloodcurdling scream woke me up. “Sarah!” I
shouted, as I kicked off my sheets and ran into the hallway, where my mother
and father had already stumbled in.
“Sarah,” my dad shouted as he
opened my sister’s door. I could see him reach in and throw on the light, and
his and my mom’s eyes widened in horror. They stood in that doorway, trembling,
and my dad said, “Sarah?” as if he couldn't believe what he saw. So I slowly
stepped forward until I could peer into the room.
Before that
moment, I had never known fear. Sure, I had been scared before. When I was six
I was almost hit by a car when I crossed the street. But that brush with death
was nothing compared to what I saw.
My sister,
shaking, covered in blood. Her pajamas ripped all over. Her face, her body,
everything was covered in these cuts, as if someone had started cutting her up
with a knife. “Mommy….Daddy?” she said weakly as she looked toward the doorway,
“he came back.”
“Who did
this to you,” my dad said as he entered the room. He got on his knees and held
my sister’s bloody hands in his own, “is he still here?” he whispered.
“He’s
always here,” my sister said in a chilling voice, too young for her age,
“always watching. Always watching for Him.”
My father
let her go and hugged her, telling her that she was safe now, and that she
would be okay. And that’s when I noticed it, her nails. The most terrifying
thing was the state of her nails. Chipped, and some even torn clean off, she
looked like she was trying to fight someone…..something off.
The next
day she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. The doctor told us that she
must have had a hallucination that somehow manipulated her into somehow
doing….that to herself. I was too young to understand what schizophrenia was,
but when they told me that she was seeing things it all just seemed so strange
to me. And it made me think back to that photo album in my sister’s room. And
the nightmares she was having. I wanted to believe the doctors. Believe that
this was something they could fix with medicine. But it wasn't long before she
managed to escape….
Well, they say she escaped, but I
knew better. About a week after she had been committed my sister vanished from
a room locked from the outside. Even ten year old me couldn't be convinced that
she had found her own way out. And now that I think back on it, my sister
seemed almost happy to hear that everything she was seeing was only in her
mind. She probably was relieved to hear that the nightmares she lived every day
could be dealt with once and for all, so why would she have run away? It
bothered me to no end, but at some point I accepted it. I was young; on some
level I must have felt obligated to believe what the doctors told me.
There was no trail to follow so the
search for my sister was called off after a couple of months. It was hard, but
my family managed to move on. And so, for nearly a decade we went about our
lives without incident. I don't know why I was able to do that, to be honest.
My sister and I had been so close; I would have expected it to take much longer
for me to come to terms with her disappearance. But I was only a child at the
time, so maybe it was just my way of coping. Regardless, Sarah Shaw was all but
forgotten by everyone in Basking Hill…….
Have you ever had that creeping
sensation down the back of your neck? That totally irrational fear of some un-seeable
horror, whispering your darkest fears into your ear while you lay there
completely helpless?
Late one night shortly after my
eighteenth birthday I saw something at the foot of my bed. The moonlight
reflected off its smooth, pale head and each and every one of its claws, which
shone as if they were made of steel. And the creature was crouched, not as if
it was about to attack, but as if it were trying to make itself as small as
possible while it observed me. A feat, I feel I must add, did not seem so easy
to accomplish given that this creature must have been about six feet tall. But
despite its curious posture, one look at it told me that, at that moment, I was
completely at this creature’s mercy, and if it wanted to, it could kill me in a
heartbeat.
I was utterly terrified. I don't
think I could have moved if I tried, and I could feel my heart pounding in my
chest harder and harder. I dared not break my gaze from its dark, empty eyes, and
as the first sign of sun appeared through my bedroom window, it leaned started
to slowly crawl closer toward me. I could feel the tips of its razor-sharp
claws pricking my skin as he leaned into my ear and whispered, “Found you,
Devin Shaw” in a soft voice that sent a chill down my spine and made the hairs
on my neck stand on end, before it swiftly crawled to my window and pushed it
open with its vicious hands. The creature took on last look at me before it silently
crawled out the window. I immediately leapt out of bed and tried to spot the
creature, but it had already disappeared.
I graduated from high school later
that day. I still don't know if that creature came to me that night for that
reason, or if it was just a coincidence. But regardless, like so many others
who have dealt with this thing before me, I pushed it out of my mind, convinced
that whatever happened was just my imagination.
A mistake that would cost me dearly….
But why
now, why would I wait almost six months since that incident before I posted
anything about it? I was contacted. This September (2012) I started my first
year at a small liberal arts college about an hour away from home. Saying that
something strange was going on would be putting it far too mildly.
After two weeks my roommate has a
nervous breakdown and had to drop out. He said he was having nightmares and
that he was hearing voices late at night.
I often came back to my room to
find it unlocked—now would be a good time to mention that I have a bit of a
compulsion about making sure my doors are always locked behind me—and my room
would be rearranged. But nothing would ever be missing.
But a little over a week ago, as I
was packing to go home for the winter holidays, a manila envelope was slipped
under my door. What I found inside scared me more than anything in my life.
Three time-stamped images from the security tape of my sister’s room at the
hospital. And in each of them, the same creature that had haunted me the night
before my graduation sat at the foot of my sister’s bed. My hands started
shaking, and I started sweating profusely. The hospital had gotten in a lot of
trouble because the security tape from that night contained nothing but ruined
video, yet there she was, sleeping, with that terrifying creature staring at
her. My fear quickly turned to anger: right now I don't know if it was at that
thing, or at the person who brought such terrible memories back into my life. I
had decided that it must be some form of prank, so I stuffed the pictures back
into the envelope, threw it in my backpack, and went to bed.
That night I awoke to the sound of
my door opening and closing. Considering I always slept with a locked door, I
was scared, and had to fight the urge to get up in case whoever had broken into
my room was dangerous. So I lay there, taking care not to move an inch whilst
keeping my eyes tightly shut. I could hear the sound of metal tapping against
the metal frame of my bed. Right then, thoughts of that night months prior
rushed into my head, and it took every ounce of strength I had to keep myself
from screaming, although now I’m sure it knew I was awake, because it leaned in
and whispered, “He always knows.” It then started walking away and I heard my
door open and close once more.
I knew that I was in danger. So I
grabbed my backpack and ran. I ran all the way to the train station and boarded
the first train to New Jersey. Once on the train I pulled out the envelope and
once again looked at the pictures. Seeing that creature brought tears to my
eyes. My nightmares…..my sister’s nightmares, they were all real. And as I
opened the envelope to put the photos away I noticed a piece of paper folded up
at the bottom. I pulled it out and opened it:
“Devin,” it read, “for help come to
<name removed> Motel at <address removed>, NJ. Tell no one.” There
was no signature. Just a circle with an X through it. I folded up the note and
took a deep breath.
My parents had no idea what I was
up to. I still haven’t told them anything. I destroyed the phone they gave me
about a week after I started running. I have since started using disposables.
It’s been a week since I ran away
from school and I am writing this in my motel room. I am sorry that I left out
the name of some of the places, but I can’t risk being found by anyone,
or anything. I saw a man sitting alone in the lobby. I think he may be the guy
I am looking for. I am going back down now to see if it is him. If not, I’ll
give him until the New Year to show up, otherwise I have to run. I don't feel
safe here. It may already be too late.
Mom, Dad. I love you.
